Nebraska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission hearing on an out-of-state company's application to export its toxic fracking wastewater into Nebraska, moving 80 truckloads carrying 10,000 barrels per day of pollution destined to be dumped into a disposal well in Sioux County — transferring all the risk onto Nebraska farmers and ranchers.

Watch This Guy's Brilliant Anti-fraking Demo

by Spocko

This is the most straight-forward and powerful video I've seen in awhile.

It's from a hearing on shipping fracking wastewater to a well in Sioux County Nebraska.

The lack of slickness helps. The crappy camerawork adds to the authenticity. I'd like my friends at various non-profits and activists to watch this to see what was done right.
The speaker knew his audience. Not only the commissioners, but the people in the room and in the community. He was not an outsider. He looked like them, dressed like them and talked like them.
He addressed the concerns of both sides before his demo
He made a powerful visual case with common items people knew
He made an emotional appeal and had an intellectual back up. This is for the people who say they only decide based on "facts," to rationalize their emotional decision.

Appearing on NBC’s “Today” on Tuesday to promote her new book, the Massachusetts senator said that the former Secretary of State deserves an opportunity to demonstrate how she plans to help the middle class if she decides to run for president.

“I think we need to give her a chance to decide if she’s going to run and to lay out what she wants to run on,” Warren said. “I think that’s her opportunity to do that.”

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“I’m not running and I’m not going to run,” Warren said. “I’m in Washington and I’ve got this great job and a chance to try and make a difference on things that really matter.”

Scott County, Indiana, the center of an exploding HIV outbreak, has been without an HIV testing center since early 2013, when the sole provider -- a Planned Parenthood clinic -- was forced to close its doors. The clinic did not offer abortion services.

The Scott County clinic and four other Planned Parenthood facilities in the state, all of which provided HIV testing and information, have shuttered since 2011, in large part due to funding cuts to the state's public health infrastructure. Those cuts came amid a national and local political campaign to demonize the health care provider. Now, the state is scrambling to erect pop-up clinics to combat an unprecedented HIV epidemic caused by intravenous drug use.

The fact that Scott County was "without a testing facility until a few weeks ago is a glaring example of the kind of public health crisis that results when prevention and testing are left unfunded," said Patti Stauffer, Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky's vice president for public policy.

Indiana's GOP-led state legislature was one of the first to declare war against Planned Parenthood in 2011, when it passed a bill that defunded the family planning provider because some of its clinics offer abortion services. A federal judge later blocked that law from going into effect, but the state has continued to slash various sources of funding to Planned Parenthood at a time when the cost of operating a medical facility continues to rise.

Dick Cheney was too busy to drive 10 miles to see CIA give George W Bush an award.

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This year’s off-the-record event, officially the Ambassador Richard M. Helms Award Ceremony, named for a Cold War-era CIA director, honored former President George W. Bush, an odd choice, it would seem, given all the trouble his administration caused the CIA (and NSA) during its eight years in office.

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As for honoring Bush, McLaughlin said, “It's not an intelligence award. It's an award for ‘service to the nation.’ Henry Kissinger, not an intelligence official, received the award last year.”

Gerald Komisar, a longtime former CIA veteran who is president of the foundation, told Newsweek, “We were very happy that Bush was able to accept our invitation.” Several senior members of the Bush administration also attended, including former White House chief of staff Andrew Card, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Homeland Security Advisor Frances Fragos Townsend. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was deeply involved in the manipulation of Iraq WMD intelligence, according to numerous reports over the years, passed up the event. “We tried to reach out to him but we couldn’t pin him down,” said Komisar, a veteran of 31 years at the CIA. “He was busy.”

Bush was honored for the “totality of the eight years he was in office,” Komisar said in a phone interview. “There were a lot of people there who attested to the fact that he did a great deal for and with the intelligence community.”

The state agency that regulates the legal profession in Virginia has canceled a planned seminar in Jerusalem following objections over Israel’s discrimination against Americans of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim ancestry.